5 ms·
I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli
by darknoon 8mo ago
I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!
- lpcvoid 8mo ago# curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file - /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.
- simonw 8mo agoChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoIf 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?
- simonw 8mo ago"Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoI disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.
- simonw 8mo agoI used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a kākāpō in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/ Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that. I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out. (I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)
- lpcvoid 8mo agoI agree that your project is cool, I just don't think the numerous downsides are worth the occasional cool thing like this.
- donkeybeer 8mo agoYes but now do the same for every bit of programming tooling, sysadmin configuration / debugging problem and concept out there. With just a few seconds to answer each reply.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoIt's called learning, and it used to be the hacker mindset to continuously improve. But I guess that died with slop generators.